Substitute a thinker you find relevant and see how you might answer the question. — Joshs

What about Victor of Aveyron? :grin:

So Romanticism says we are all our own precious and sacred spark of divine genius. Nous. Geist. Logos. PoMo translate this theistic tradition into something just as recognisable in its existential fetishisation of contingency, relativism, temporality, and autonomy.

Pragmatism/semiotics instead places genius squarely in the communal mind of a process of rational inquiry taken to its pragmatic limits. So there is no expectation that one has to be responsible for one's own individual genius. We are all clearly trying to stand on shoulders of giants and answer questions that have already been intelligibly framed by some community of inquiry. We start with an audience demanding a suitable reply and a little impatient with crackpot or naive responses.

To shift a paradigm thus requires both a tippable collective state of mind and also the event - the idea or observation - that tips it.

But sure, you would argue that "poetry" has its place in all this. Even a central place. Discourse need not be so rational. It could usefully be allusive and exploratory. A quiet stretching of possibilities. A way to deal with the indeterminate grounding of any axiom-driven mode of inquiry.

I've always found poetry tedious. I'll just admit it. And while I loved many high romantic works of art and literature as a teen, well now I find them mostly cringy and over-wrought. So I am very prejudiced against any idea that poetry is more than entertainment. It was once important when social memory was oral. And even early philosophy was often recorded in poetic form. But we can see how much it also suffered in that choice of telling.

And anyway, there is Peircean semiotics to deal with the vagueness or firstness – the tychic spontaneity – of existence. Rationality caught up there as well. The indeterminate grounding of any axiom-driven mode of inquiry was incorporated into the mothership as part of its ongoing development.

Victor of Aveyron and other feral children illustrate both the romantic expectations that surround the idea of human specialiness and the crashing fact that we are simply a socially constructed species, a linguistic community engaged in linguistically transforming the dissipative basis of our way of life.

A shared project has been in train since cave folk first started leaving their stained handprints on rock walls. Self actualisation is just the individual limit placed on Maslow's communally-defined hierarchy of needs.

We all have some vast weight of social history that constrains our personal journeys into the meaning of life. Our world is already deeply reasonable in some collective evolutionary way. We simply stand on its shoulders and debate what further truths we think we can see.

Unless you are a Victor and skipped that essential cultural download stage while your brain was still plastic and ready to absorb it.

You asked about objective measurement. I don't see how that is meaningful. I'm not making an argument here, I'm just trying to answer your question. — noAxioms

Just stop. You know that my epistemology is semiotic and pragmatic. The subjectivity and informality of acts of measurement are what it is all about, I only used “objective” in the conventional sense so as not to add yet another level of confusion to this thread.

OK. I didn't specify an actualized triangle, since the point of this whole topic is that the triangle doesn't seem to need to be actualized in order to have 3 corners. The form is enough, although it will need to be a less general form if it's to be a right triangle or not. — noAxioms

Will you ever clarify your point then?

In what sense does your triangle exist? Where in nature does the abstraction reside? Does a count of corners say everything that could be said about triangularity? How many different kinds of measurements distinguish triangles from one another yet are also differences that don’t make a difference to you proclaiming you see a triangle … in your mind or somewhere?

You seem to want to claim a triangle as a Platonic form, yet have no proper theory of what that means. How are you imagining triangularity in terms of its measured essentials, and thus able to disregard differences that you consider accidental, or only essential now to some subclass of triangles.

Even if you go full Platonic idealism, you will find the same logic of vagueness coming into view. You will just be taking a different route.

Naming distinctions that break symmetries is how it works. It is counterfactuality all the way down until … finally, in the limit, it isn’t. And we need a larger logic, a deeper sense of modality, to handle such a cut-off in our descriptions of nature.

This doesn't tell me if the triangle gets actualized in the process of this emergence. I don't see why it should any more than 221 gets actualized because it divides by 13. — noAxioms

Your simple notion of a triangle as a three corner object arises in the limit of the sum of all the differences in triangularity that don’t make a difference.

So you adopt the position that the three corners don’t have all have the same angle, they only have to add up to 180 degrees. But someone else might insist that only an equilateral triangle is a true triangle. Someone else might point out that even your 180 degrees is a suspect definition as there are also hyperbolic and hyperspheric triangles.

What you claim to be simple and obvious just isn’t that at all. Your replies seem to say you are either confused or insensitive to that fact.

Everything could be a universal, some more minimal than others, but none to the point of the actualization required for it to be designated a particular. — noAxioms

Fine. You can make a hierarchy of distinctions and claim it is counterfactuals all the way down. Everything rests on its stack of turtles.

But what you have forgotten is that every counterfactual step describes some act of measurement. It specifies a way to separate what is formally necessary from what is materially accidental.

So in moving from some emergent notion of completely abstract triangleness to every acceptably nameable grade of triangularity - from a topological definition to increasing constrained geometric ones - you keep squeezing out the accidental features. But where do you finally exhaust this process and find the bottom of this chain of measurement? You can show me the last concrete distinction.

Or do you instead simply subdivide your general notion of triangularity to the limit of what seems pragmatically useful and interesting to you, and then declare any further differencing as merely accidents and not necessities. Noise not signal. And as the next step, conveniently forget that it was these accidents that were necessary to the formal counterfactualising all the way down to your chosen limit of interest.

Well this is the Platonic issue. This is the problem that exists even in Platonia. The accidental must exist for the necessary to claim its existence. It is the same metaphysical argument by which we say that formal cause must be matched by material cause in a theory of substantial or actual being.

That is why we can reduce the notion of material cause to “accidents that don’t matter” - as in a quantum foam of virtual excitations or fluctuations. The material principle can be both as little as imagined, yet still absolutely necessary to breath fire into those damn equations.

Again, I've not taken any classes in ancient philosophy. Plato requires a god to do the magic parts. I'm hoping for something a little more modern than that. — noAxioms

Listen to yourself. You admit your understanding is superficial. You demonstrate your understanding is superficial. Then you give yourself an excuse not to address that superficiality in your understanding.

If you want something more modern, read Peirce. But you are even less prepared than you realise.

The "bridge-burning" theory is plausible, but highly speculative. — SophistiCat

Another detail making it more likely to be Russia is the ease of access. It’s being said they could just wheel explosive down the pipe using the inspection pig.

But who knows.

https://www.wermac.org/nordstream/html_img86.html

I guess this is precisely what I question. Russians were cool with the Chechen wars and the tactics used in Syria. If Kiev was a smoking heap, how is that different from the other stuff? — Paine

Frankly I’m surprised the “Kyiv feint” guys aren’t pushing this more. Kyiv is considered the mother city of Russian culture. So levelling it would be a no-no. This would be why the battle plan would have been to deliver such a shock encirclement that Zelensky would flee/get assassinated and a puppet regime installed. No real damage done.

I’m not sure but it seems similar to how Israelis would view Jerusalem. A bit too holy to bomb. However I’ve seen no one saying that so I need to go check.

It could also be one reason for falling back when plan A didn’t work. Unlike the fate of all the border cities and villages where bringing in the artillery was the way to liberate their Russian citizens from Nazi oppression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

But would you agree that someone like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard , who spent their whole lives with no recognition of their ideas, benefited from the guidance of those ideas as much in isolation as they would have if the ideas had formed the basis of a community paradigm? — Joshs

You tell me. In what way did they benefit in their isolation? In what way would they have profited more if everyone else had joined them in applying the same existential analysis?

I have so little interest in them that I simply couldn’t even guess. I never saw anything of pragmatic use, although perhaps you mean how their writings function as romantic spectacle or popular entertainment?

Measurement is meaningful between two systems, and thus is a relation between them. — noAxioms

Frankly I tire of these weak arguments. There is no problem measuring different states of the one system at different stages of its development.

The problem with vagueness becomes that it’s measurement is in fact defined by becoming unable to make a measurement. It marks the point where the determined tips into indeterminacy.

That is what I asked you to think about to get a clear idea of what vaguess logically means. It is the point where counterfactuality ceases, where the PNC no longer can obtain.

The quantum foam is that kind of “stuff”. Uncertainty maximised. And yet we still want to call it a something in that it is now a complete certain lack of certainty. We can still treat it as a modal category that gets us over the familiar difficulties when it comes to metaphysical-strength inquiry.

A rock measures the temperature (physics definition), but doesn't know that it's cold out (epistemic definition). But it being cold out at a particular location is true in this world and not others, so it isn't an objective measurement. — noAxioms

You’re pissing around with quibbles because you haven’t understood what I’ve said.

My epistemology is founded on an ontology of relations. Structuralism is simply that. But I “agree” that seems to leave the problem of the relata. Something must always anchor the two ends of a relation it would seem.

That is why you need to take the next step to a triadic metaphysics that can give you the threeness of relata in relations. And a developmental triadic metaphysics at that. You want to have a general logic of how relata in relations could arise out of a foundation of logical vagueness.

I realise this is a difficult idea. But this is a philosophy site.

Let's go with the question "does a triangle have three corners?". — noAxioms

Does a polygon have three corners? Did you notice that one corner of the triangle is very slightly dented so we could argue it has four corners. Etc.

We are always working within an ontology where formal descriptions and material measurements go hand in hand.

The necessary form of a triangle is in its structural definition. The substantial existence of a triangle is dependent on that form being actually actualised. The potential to actualise particular forms is where the material principle comes in.

The query would be more interesting if you asked the general question of is there a minimal polygon. The triangle could then emerge as a development of an inquiry seeking its maximal simplicity. It’s limit condition.

But you just want to talk in particulars and bypass the reality of universals. Even when you mean to speak about universals.

Plato’s Timaeus arrives at triangles as the basic form of actualised reality - the kind that lives in time and thus fixes an energy - by applying a least action principle. And modern particle physics does its own similar sum over histories in arriving at the gauge symmetries that explain the Standard Model.

But what if I don't see the necessity to attempt that? Said ideal forms are no less forms without fire breathed into them. — noAxioms

If even Plato couldn’t actually go that far with Platonism, why do you think there is no problem at all for you?

Plato seems to just record all this and doesn't contribute — noAxioms

Is the Platonic dialogue an unfamiliar format to you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_of_Locri

You seem to not be able to describe my point in your own words, — noAxioms

I would say you didn’t have a thought clear enough to articulate. And no progress is being made on that score.

You mean can paradigm shifting genius exist? Sure, why not?

But paradigm shifting means bringing the community with you. Otherwise nothing has happened.

It also helps greatly when the old paradigm had reached a tipping point. It become easy to shift.

And also there is no need just for this to be something exceptional. My systems view says a productive society produces creative leaps in scalefree fashion - large and small.

Peirce is perhaps a bad example as in his own life he signally failed to achieve the paradigm shift that I say he deserved. It was not a tippable moment, especially in his particular social location.

If he had been a professor in Germany, just imagine how the reaction might have been quite dramatic.

So Peirce dramatically changed my paradigm and that of the small community of theoretical biologists I was associated with in the late 1990s. We were all tippable in immediate fashion as we were already halfway there in looking for such a shift. There was hierarchy theory, category theory, second order cybernetics, Bertalannfy’s systems theory, dissipative structure theory, and much else all in the mix.

Peirce’s triadic semiosis and logic of vagueness then clicked everything finally into place. The last crystallising thought.

So yes, individual minds are always contributing in creative fashion. That is why the relationship can be a reciprocal one.

You can’t go beyond unless there is something already there to mark a line. And then when you step across it, it depends how many rush to join you that decides whether you were the group’s paradigm shifter or the lonely crank howling in the dark.

I didn’t really address what seems your goal here - some kind of step towards a next level of mind.

But my points do go to this issue. You can’t do much about your neurobiology except to be in reasonably good health. So your focus would have to be on the socially constructed aspects of the human animal.

That would mean getting the best possible training in the skill of critical thinking - what philosophy is supposed to do of course. But also in a broader sense, the positive psychology movement uses social constructionist principles to help you develop the skills of self awareness and self actualisation.

Your framing of the issues could place too much emphasis on simplistic mind expansion of the kind that is like taking drugs or meditating to open the doors of perception. Some neurobiological gimmick.

Or it might over emphasise becoming super intellectual in terms of abstract thinking skills.

But if we are social creatures, then logically the mental technology that is most basic to improving our lot in life is that which allows us to understand how to construct our selfhood in relation to our social environment. Finding our place in the world.

Being in control of that would be a powerful aspiration. And quite trainable. It just doesn’t conform to the usual stereotypes folk have about the nature of “consciousness” as something highly individual and competively ranked.

Positive psychology is about recognising that reaching higher levels of mind is a collaborative enterprise. Team work. A collectively developing community of minds.

My first thought is that the inquiry itself is a helpful place to begin exploring. — Universal Student

Three key bits of advice here.

First note you need to differentiate between the neurobiological awareness of animals and the language and culture expanded conciousness of humans. Awareness is biological. Self awareness is socially constructed. Knowing that should deflate a large part of the problem as it is the neurobiology that is the complicated bit.

Second, it will help to realise that awareness is not about a passive neural display - a representation of the world - that then requires some further mysterious witness. This is the dualistic Cartesian mistake. Awareness is a pragmatic and embodied modelling relation with the world. The brain exists to predict how the world could be in the light of actions that might be taken. It is an active engagement rather than a passive contemplation.

A third thing that could be added when it comes to getting started on the neurobiology is that neuroscientists prefer to talk about awareness in terms of its two critical levels of process - habit and attention. As part of the whole prediction-based design of the brain, it is set up to learn to process the world as automatically and “unconsciously” as possible. Attention only kicks in if the world doesn’t fit the predictions and the brain has to pause to generate some new predictive state that better explains the available evidence.

but whether supporting the US agenda is part of your narrative or not is unclear. — Isaac

Oh Lordy. At least we know your agenda then. I’m just interested in the whys and wherefores.

Given multiple plausible narratives which are under determined by the evidence, why have you chosen the one you have? — Isaac

Which one do you think I have chosen? The options have been narrowed by batting away some of crazier views however.

People have suggested it is plausible. — Isaac

It is you who are making the claim of implausibility. You have yet to provide a shred of evidence to support such a claim. — Isaac

Many shreds have been provided. Might I dare suggest that is at least a plausible suggestion and thus join you in evading all calls for credible support for anything I might happen to say at any point in these proceedings, m’lud? :lol:

One side is merely claiming a position to be plausible, the other is claiming that no other position than theirs is plausible. — Isaac

You mean one side claims Kyiv was a feint, Russian forces have proved competent, Putin has strictly limited war aims. And the other side is meant to believe these implausible interpretations by unknown posters who can’t provide credible professional analysis to back up what they say. :up:

I've provided plenty of sources throughout my contributions, but on this particular issue (the motivation behind Russian foreign policy) there's academics like Daniel Treisman, experts such as Fyodor Lukyanov, Andrei Tsygankov, Richard Sawka, Marie Mendras... — Isaac

No, no. I asked for actual articles or clips that present the case you want to make. But I have been reading Treisman on interesting issues like Russia’s information autocracy.

And I also wasn’t surprised that Treisman dismisses your talking point that Putin has no imperialist ambitions. So you see why I ask, where are the credible sources that support what you claim?

But in subsequent years, this grievance came back in ever more elaborate forms. And now a new identity has burst through. Putin no longer accepts the compromises of the Soviet past. His recent words and actions suggest he has become a radical nationalist, out to reshape borders and forge a single people out of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, despite the human costs of war.

Pre-1917 “historic Russia” included a range of territories beyond just Ukraine, some of which — like Kazakhstan, the Baltic states and Moldova — have ethnic Russian minorities. If Putin stays true to the convictions he embraced in his speech on Monday, the door he has opened may prove hard for the world to close.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/25/words-deeds-putin-shows-hes-rejecting-even-soviet-era-borders/

Simply because the Western media repeats again and again bold claims without justification, — boethius

Simply because some random internet dude repeats un-evidenced claims, full of obvious holes, over and over again, doesn’t mean I am going to take them seriously.

You clearly don't understand what sources are about. — boethius

I know they are more than some random dude on the internet. Even if it is opinion, I prefer it from someone with a name and credible credentials.

Likewise, you only have to check my posts to see the sources. — Isaac

So show me a post where you gave a source after I requested it. Otherwise disinformation.

Yeah. Likewise, I also checked Google to see where your talking points might be sourced, but nothing respectable turned up either. — Isaac

More disinformation. You only have to check my posts to see the sources. :smile:

You think the idea of sourcing things is a talking point? — boethius

I commented on the odd reluctance of apologists to source their talking points. I might also remark on what seems to be a tactic of confusing the discussion with non sequiturs.

But here is a source that supports you guys. Marvel at the quality and credentials.

Russian disinformation might like to call it a clever feint, but then there was this even sweeter lie….

Dmitry Peskov, when asked about the failed Russian northern invasion route, said: “Now, about the Kyiv and Chernobyl regions, so actually the troops were really withdrawn from these regions as an act of goodwill, between the two negotiation parties.

Whether or not the various alternative narratives here have been sourced is easily checked, — Isaac

I have indeed googled to see where your talking points might be sourced. Strangely nothing respectable is turning up. So I can only continue to say either pony up or expect to be treated dismissively.

I guess I'd be pretty reluctant to share my sources too — Tzeentch

You are indeed very coy on your sources. Like others pushing the same talking points on this forum. :chin:

So I should avoid talking about things I do not understand. — jgill

I take the opposite view. It’s the fastest way to learn. :grin:

Wokism is mostly Marxist and pre-Marxist dialectics. Modernist emancipatory dialectics is what postmodernism rejected. — Joshs

Ah. Thanks for the clarification. :up:

REG: Listen. If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you'd have to really hate the Romans.

BRIAN: I do!

REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.

FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.

LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

REG: What? We're the People's Front of Judea!

LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.

FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He's over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!

Putin is Hitler 2.0….someone had to say it :grin:

Putin’s trajectory increasingly resembles that of Hitler. Both men came to power after their countries experienced imperial dismemberment and economic collapse. Both promised to revive their nation’s glory and enjoyed enormous popularity. Both militarized and pursued state capitalism. Both relied on the army and secret police. Both identified their nations with themselves. Both promoted reactionary ideologies that identified one nation — Jews for Hitler, Ukrainians for Putin — as the enemy. And both used their national minorities living in neighboring states as pretexts for expansion. Both were also consummate liars and had deranged personalities. In this scheme of things, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is equivalent to Hitler’s attack on Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland. And we all know what happened afterward — a Vernichtungskrieg.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/14/lets-call-putin-fascist-autocrat-00016982

What about the formal basis of such concepts as semiosis, code, information and thermal dissipation? Is there not an assumed irreducible ground for them , a formal content of some sort that is not itself co-emergent but is instead the condition of possibility of co-emergence? — Joshs

Sure. But that is covered by Peirce too. You have the cycle of reasoning which is abductive hypothesis, deductive theory forming, and inductive confirmation. Rinse and repeat. Even to be able to state that this is the canonical process is covered by this turning out to be the process.

One must axiomatise to construct a formal system. But that itself starts out as a productive stab in the dark turned into inveterate habit.

Decentering difference is the watchword. — Joshs

Everyone becoming their own world is another way of saying the same thing.

And when plurality is taken to its own logical extreme, it becomes wokism. We see the hard, fixed and eternal becoming the enforced collective norm that tolerates no diversity when it comes to its diversity.

That is the advantage of pragmatism. It’s always about the actuality of selves and worlds in functional interaction. Semiotics is the structure of how things exist - or rather, how they historically persist - as dynamical balances employing cybernetic feedback.

To continue knocking down the talking points of Putin apologists, remember this?…

So Kyiv feint? Putin’s limited ambitions? Time to put the sourceless disinformation to bed.

RIA Novosti is now known as the Russian regime’s ally. On February 26th, at 8 AM Moscow time, it published a pre-written article to mark the end of the special operation in Ukraine. But due to Russian defeats in key areas on the Eastern borders, the article was deleted from the official website. Nevertheless, it is still available thanks to the WBM online archives.

Entitled “The advent of Russia and a new world” (Наступление России и нового мира), it declares that “Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world — the Russian people — together, in their entirety, from Great Russians to Belarusians and Little Russians.” It continues by stating that “if we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, then we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors but would also be cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.” This imperial message is then completed with the following: “Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukrainian question to future generations.”

This article, published in error, demonstrates that Russia was planning to conquer Kyiv in two days, more or less.

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-goebbels-method-ria-novosti-as-window-into-russian-propaganda/

If that is the case, doesn't that condition apply to your assessment that the attack on Kiev was only a feint? — Paine

This account of what US intelligence knew and what the allies could believe about the looming invasion is fascinating.

It is clear that the US had detailed inside information. But it was hard to credit Putin would risk such an ambitious plan with such sketchy forces.

On Jan. 12, Burns met in Kyiv with Zelensky and delivered a candid assessment. The intelligence picture had only become clearer that Russia intended to make a lightning strike on Kyiv and decapitate the central government. The United States had also discovered a key piece of battlefield planning: Russia would try to land its forces first at the airport in Hostomel, a suburb of the capital, where the runways could accommodate massive Russian transports carrying troops and weapons. The assault on Kyiv would begin there.

“If you discover the plans of somebody to attack a country and the plans appear to be completely bonkers, the chances are that you are going to react rationally and consider that it’s so bonkers, it’s not going to happen,” said Heisbourg, the French security expert.
“The Europeans overrated their understanding of Putin,” he said. “The Americans, I assume … rather than try to put themselves in Putin’s head, decided they were going to act on the basis of the data and not worry about whether it makes any sense or not.”

There had been many reasons to be mystified. U.S. intelligence showed that the Kremlin’s war plans were not making their way down to the battlefield commanders who would have to carry them out. Officers didn’t know their orders. Troops were showing up at the border not understanding they were heading into war. Some U.S. government analysts were bewildered by the lack of communication within the Russian military. Things were so screwy, the analysts thought, Russia’s plans might actually fail. But that remained a distinctly minority view.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-to-war/

Anyway your posts were really interesting and analytic.And made me extra curious about semiotics.I will search more. — dimosthenis9

The hardcore stuff is Howard Pattee's biosemiosis papers, and earlier epistemic cut approach. There is also Rosen's modelling relations, but that was more based on category theory.

But generally, if it is Peircean semiotics, it is what I'm talking about. If it is Saussure's semiotics, then that is something else that is very popular in Continental circles.

By definition, measurement isn't objective. — noAxioms

We were talking about the problem of substantial existence - ontology rather than epistemology. So this is off the point.

A better question is to first ask if it exists, or if its existence can be meaningful. 'No' seems a better answer to both questions, so the question of why vanishes. — noAxioms

Pfft. My argument is that this is about modalities of existence. We can have potential existence or actual existence. We can have accidental existence or necessary existence. We can have vague existence or definite existence.

You can give up on "existence" if you like. But my argument is all about more careful definitions of its modality. And I've pointed you towards the long history of metaphysical discussion on that.

I am apparently not conveying my point at all. Nobody seems to get it, even if to just disagree with it. You’re all discussing other things.

Forget our physics and materials and quantum foam and such. Start with the simple examples like the triangle and such where talk of ‘cause’ and such doesn’t come into the picture. — noAxioms

Where did you lay out a triangle argument? You mean why a triangle is not a circle? You mean triangles as eternal Platonic forms?

If you checked out the Timeaus you would see that triangles become a good example of how Plato tried to breath animating fire into his ideal forms.

The Timaeus is Plato’s only cosmological dialogue where one of the most difficult questions
of his doctrine is considered in some detail: the so-called ‘participation’ of ‘sensible world’ in
the intelligible world, or the Forms or Ideas.

The khôra is not only the place where perpetual changes of the sensible bodies occur, but also the unqualified and unchanging ‘genus’ required to explain these perpetual changes; it is the dynamical whole, consisting of these bodies in perpetual change, their ‘nurse’, their nourisher and their ‘mother’.

First, Timaeus claims that anything that is born must have a body. Thus, to be corporeal, the
universe needs to be both ‘tangible and visible’. For the former attribute to hold true, earth is
needed, fire for the latter. However, Timaeus claims immediately that the unity of the world
needs both elements to be strongly bound, and that the ‘most beautiful’ bound, is the
‘proportion’ between four terms: a/b = c/d.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.11947.pdf

And so we arrive at a Pythagorean triangle - divided in two – as the primal form from which nature could be atomistically constructed. The "two triangle universe" that hinges on the orthogonality of the right angle and the minimal number of sides that could bound an object in such a Euclidean notion of space.

It is like the ancient world's version of string theory. :razz:

But the point is even Plato was wrestling with the issue that I take Hawking as pointing towards.

Yes you can reduce reality to geometric or symmetry principles. Talking about the necessities of form really does seem to capture most of what needs to be said in modelling the world. And that is what equations do.

But you still need a khôra to supply whatever then breaths the animating fire into the structural forms. That is the bit of the puzzle which really demands breaking out of the mould of concrete thought. The question about the material cause of being is where the hard work has to be done.

Peirce said we needed a new logical category. And Peirce after all pretty much invented modern logic, even if Frege got the credit for his simpler – more reductionist – version.

These would seem to be transcendental , but not in a strictly Kantian sense. What they do have in common with Kant is that they are objective formal principles. The implication is that personal experience , any kind of history and subjective time will forever be guided by a specific unchanging normative meta-frame. Is this right? — Joshs

It is true that Peirce moves us usefully beyond the start made by Kant.

But why take the conversation back to Descartes by talking about "personal experience" as if it could be anything else but a normed construct – a product of a modelling relation in which the "self" arises as part of "its world".

You are making "personal experience" into your own eternalised given here, aren't you?

Semiosis is the explanation for how such "first person" points of view arise as part of the information economy of a dissipation-driven enterprise. Meaning and value is what emerges as a result of that thermally embodied modelling process.

So you sound like you want to be able to preserve your conscious or unconscious Cartesian framing of the metaphysics. I am saying that Peirce already takes us into another world where nothing is eternal and fixed, all is co-emergent and developmental.

Reality is a self-organising process and not a state of substantial being. Although of course in the foreshortened synchronic view of any persisting structure, what we mostly see is just what looks fixed and eternal.

But you can indeed recover that familiar viewpoint in the diachronic limit. The self can seem to exist as it own hard centre of value and meaning. Otherwise how else would Romanticism and PoMo find their claims to metaphysical legitimacy? :wink:

Why don't you respond to my comment, instead of clowning? — Tzeentch

Because I cannot take you seriously. You give me no reason to.

The real question is if we could ever figure out how nature is and works regardless of our minds or senses.The real "nature" of nature,so to speak. — dimosthenis9

I think the right view is to marvel at how it has been possible to extend semiosis to the degree that it has. Through metaphysics and science, humans have continued on to develop a level of reality modelling in which the world is seen from a "God's eye view". And not even the old fashioned kind of creating father-figure God that is just an idealised personification of a human observer, but a truly transcendent and coordinate free perspective which is pansemiotic, or the Universe's own view of itself (in some useful epistemic sense).

So once you reduce reality to a disembodied causal description - one based on symmetry and symmetry breaking – then you are claiming to talk about what is necessary and fundamental in regards to any kind of cosmic being whatsoever. You are seeing the deepest principles of nature and how it works – having stripped the view of all its superficial accidents to fix on its structural necessities.

So yeah. We are limited by our biology and sociology to being embodied observers of reality. But it is astonishing how well we can construct a useful notion of the perfectly disembodied observer contemplating the mathematical necessities of its own cosmic existence.

Celebrate the fact. No need to downplay the achievement.

Is it possible that we might need a new set of semiotics then as to go further,at least to difficult questions like in QM?And can we actually establish a new set of semiotics that could go even Maths further?I have no idea of what these semiotics could be or even if it is actually possible,if you ask me. — dimosthenis9

This is a tough question. First I would say that "real semiosis" is about an actual modelling relation in which a self is wanting to act on a world. There is some organism living and thriving in its environment. This means all the semiotic intelligence is being paid for by its functional results. It is a negentropic eddy in its environment that earns it keep by degrading entropy gradients. Baseline, life and mind exist because they use energy and increase entropy as the second law of thermodynamics demands.

Humans equipped with words and numbers just take this kind of "intelligence entrained to entropification" to a new level. We are now technological and civilisational organisms, growing at an exponential rate like bacterial spores on a Petrie dish. We produce enough waste heat to kill a planet.

Bad for us perhaps. But certainly this is following the logic of the cosmos. Semiosis exists because there is entropification to be done.

So what does semiosis mean once it rises above the worldly constraints of the second law? Science is still entrained to the second law when it is building human social machinery. Even our most sophisticated abstractions, like social media or bitcoin, have a considerable energy footprint. The electronics behind the information runs hot.

But would understanding the reality of the Big Bang be useful information in that entropic sense? Would we be able to create our own further Big Bangs – as was feared when they fired up the last supercollider? Or create simulated Big Bangs – as some claim our own Big Bang existence to be?

So yeah. Something changes as the modelling relation stops being between actual organisms entrained to the second law and instead this more lofty and disinterested pansemiotic view that may simply have no payback. Or in other words, becomes not even testable in terms of its conceivable practical effects.

This is a tricky area. But hey. It is not as if it is even a widely considered question. Semiosis is largely only understood in biology and sociology circles. It hasn't entered physics as a pansemiotic paradigm – although dissipative structure theory is paving the way.

So I guess you suggest that we need a new form of reasoning that would make us think different about what we observe.A new intelligence.A paradigm shift.Right?Is that possible then?And if yes how? Would that be a next step in human evolution? Leaving Homo behind? — dimosthenis9

Well there is a lot of what I think is silly talk about the Singularity and other thoughts about being uploaded to the cybersphere to become eternal and infinitely smart beings. That extrapolates the bad metaphysics of the Cartesian mind.

The self is seen as a disconnected and passive representer of reality, and so a data structure in a supercomputer ought to be able to replicate the same kind of informational state at far greater scale.

This is the model of the mind that semiotics explicitly rejects in talking about consciousness as an embodied or enactive modelling relation.

So my answer is that if you stop to think about Homo sapiens as a semiotic organism that serves the second law, then it becomes clear that we took our big evolutionary leaps first with the invention of language – quite a swift transition about 40,000 years ago once the grammatical structure was fully codified. And then about 400 years ago, we took another huge step with the codification of the "grammar" of our mathematical reality models. Differential equations in particular – the path to engineering and machinery – created a new modelling capacity.

That capacity would then have been not much of a big deal except we then also found we were sitting on buried reservoirs of fossil hydrocarbon. A planet's worth of coal and petroleum that the Universe would really want entropifying if anyone was smart enough to "eat" such toxic waste.

And Homo sapiens obliged. We became that sort of creature. And the Earth became that sort of planet.

So this is nature doing its thing. Finding ways to dissipate. Organisms armed with semiosis are nature's way to break down the barriers to dissipation. That is what intelligence is for in the cosmic scheme.

So yes. We can definitely use a deep understanding of nature to predict what lies in the future for us.

That explains why humans use so much of their smarts to deny and ignore climate change. We evolved to do a job. We can't just abandon it half done.

Too bad if this looks as dumb as bacteria reproducing furiously on a Petrie dish until their exponential growth collapses. Humans might have thought they were smart, but only discovered the reasons they came to view the world as they did – entrained to endless upward "progress" – much too late.

So the modern technological human self is in fact a quite unaware self in this regard. A social order was built around the cheap and limitless energy of fossil carbon. Modern society has the inbuilt urge to perpetuate that dissipative structure, and has never - in its short 400 years – had the reason or stimulus to build in a longer term energy transition plan.

But that gives you an answer to next possible levels of semiosis perhaps. We could have done something even just by instituting a simple mathematical trick like a carbon tax. We could have factored environmental costs into our economic projections. We could have regulated the markets so that information about the true ecological price of our consumption was something every market participant had clear in their minds.

The maths of these moves is completely trivial. No new semiotic technology required. But semiosis is about meaning creation. And building a new level of meaning into the system was what was required. The health of the planet should have been included in the cost of daily life.

So you do agree also that is possible no collapse at all taking place over there and we just think we spot one?Right? — dimosthenis9

No. My point is that "quantum weirdness" runs the gamut from maximally weird to not detectably weird at all under the mathematical framework provided by decoherence theory – the bolting of statistical mechanics onto quantum field theory.

So nature provides us with situations that range from minimally constrained to maximally constrained. Quantum mechanics simply reveals that nature runs this gamut. That is why an experimenter can arrange a measurement so that the observation is as nonlocal as possible, or as local as possible ... if the experimenter has the right machinery to shut the valve or open the valve.

This is important as life itself is based on molecular machinery – protein structures that can act as switches that turn "quantumness" on and off at the nanoscale level of quantum chemistry. Your existence is wholly dependent on respiratory chains that can take a hot electron and skip it down a set of precisely spaced receptors using quantum tunnelling, and so milk the electron of the energy needed to load up an ATP or other energy-carrying molecule.

Experimenters can turn knobs to tune quantum weirdness in and out of focus. Life is the semiotic trick of being able to do the same at the level needed to regulate organic chemistry. (Although we've only really known this for about 15 years.)

So I am saying that decoherence is a no collapse story. But only in the sense that it is instead a model of how nature runs the gamut between quantum coherence and quantum decoherence. Either a system has so many informational constraints that it approaches the classical limit, or it is so informationally unconstrained that it approaches the quantum limit.

And then on top of this labile spectrum, we can drop our own system of semiotic switches. We can control the degree of constraint – turn a knob from "collapsed" to "uncollapsed" and back again.

So nature has a richness of states. We make life simple by imposing a binary logic upon that. And even life itself exists because it invented codes that could operate a set of molecular switches to regulate decoherence. A respiratory chain could have its sequenece of iron-sulphur clusters spaced at exactly the right distance, down to angstroms, so a hot electron could do nothing else but skip down the fixed path provided to the waiting oxygen atom at the end of the line.

History's greatest feat of precision engineering, especially once you understand how much mitochondrial damage would be wreaked by a hot electron escaping the chain.

What could that training be? — dimosthenis9

It might help to start with a science like ecology where you need that kind of maths coupled to that kind of holistic situation. My story was that I was getting frustrated with the state of neurobiology and mind science – too reductionist. And so I looked around to see who really had a handle on holistic models of reality. It turned out to be theoretical biologists who were by then into hierarchy theory, systems science, cybernetics and - eventually - Peircean semiotics.

So you won't get given a training. You really have to go looking for it.

There is holism in physics as well. You have condensed matter physics, topological order, dissipative structure theory and holographic approaches all starting to come through strongly.

And even neurobiology has caught up with its "enactive turn". Friston's Bayesian brain is exactly the kind of semiotic model I'm talking about.

Not with landing paratroops on them. — ssu

Hah. It really is just that simple. :lol:

Keep hitting him with the facts. Watch it make no difference to the propaganda.

Why would I want to? — Tzeentch

To show that you could?

So what these authors are really criticizing here is not the Russian military, but their own false conceptions of the Russian military. — Tzeentch

This is also true.

But on the surprising incompetence side, we have systemic corruption, a historic undervaluing of logistics, a lack of NCO structure, no routine cross force training, a lack of communication gear, a lack of training hours, low morale and lack of mission preparation, plus umpteen other inadequacies that became apparent as your “small but perfectly formed fighting force” breezed through already half occupied Donbas and started to encounter headwinds.

Plan B became liberate Ukraine by levelling it with artillery. Plan C is truck in the raw conscripts and perhaps start setting nuclear power plants on fire or lobbing a few tactical nukes.

If all this is your definition of competence then … OK.

But the debate is around the extent to which 'fierce imperialist' is even part of Putin's story. — Isaac

Again, fierce imperialist was your terminology and not mine. I entered the debate disputing some dumb comments about Putin only making a feint at Kyiv, having goals limited to a chunk of ethniic borderland, and having no desire to continue on if it had won quick success in Ukraine.

And then apart from the geopolitical logic of wanting defensible borders - the driver of territorial expansion - there is Putin’s more general existential driver of a war against US ideological hegemony. It is a battle for psychological Lebensraum. Letting Russia be Russia - even if that now means his greedy and opportunistic, corrupt and incompetent, kleptocracy I guess.

There again is the puzzle. Sure one can understand how oppressed he feels by US hegemony. But to push things as far as a war with a real chance of turning nuclear and creating Europe-wide disaster?

And does it make any more sense seen the other way as a domestic necessity to prop up his own regime and expand his wealth? If Putin had sat tight and continued his low grade trouble making, would anyone have tried to topple him or sanction him? The US had already pivoted to China. Ukraine could have been undermined in the usual sly ways without crystallising sides with an overt war.

If you then listen to Putin’s speeches, what comes through is the sense of humiliation and resentment. Something China also shares. Empires that feel it is their historical right to be empires, and also with bitter memories of how those empires kept getting formed and then broken up by outsiders.

So is Putin just touchy? And believe he is indeed the embodiment of Russia and carries that responsibility? So all this is an emotional reaction seeking its reasons?

That is why I like the idea that Putin is a psychological phenomenon just like a Trump or any other leader who concocts a cult of self that becomes the state’s organisational principle with its own ever escalating logic.

What starts off as private calculation harnessing public emotions becomes the structure of power itself. Putin’s choices are constrained by the logic of his own propaganda. He ends up the puppet of his own reality framing.

To risk so much for so little is ridiculous. Putin’s apologists must pretend he had limited goals, his regime is competent, the West is far more invidious than people realise.

But here we are anyway. And there is still a need for an accurate assessment to predict how this continues of unfold.

You could link a hundred articles saying that the Russian military is terrible. — Tzeentch

Sure could. Can you link to even one that argues the opposite in convincing fashion?

The Russian army went on the offensive against a (roughly) peer adversary while numerically disadvantaged - that's a military feat in and of itself. It managed to defeat the Ukrainian army in the first part of the war (a blow from which the Ukrainians have since recovered) and take substantial parts of Ukraine, which, based on the troops deployed, likely coincided with their initial wargoals. — Tzeentch

Meanwhile back on planet Earth….

"The poor performance of Russia's armed forces during its invasion of Ukraine has been costly for Russia's military leadership, highly likely resulting in the dismissal of at least six Russian commanders since the start of hostilities in February 2022," the Defence Ministry said in a Sunday tweet.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-lost-fired-generals-since-ukraine-war-uk-intelligence-2022-8

cracks began to appear in the Russian army almost immediately. Ukraine’s air capabilities, Russia’s first and most important target, survived the initial onslaught. Russia’s VDV, famed paratroopers, were dropped without support into heavily defended positions. They were sacrificed so recklessly that some wondered if Putin was purging their ranks. By land, Russian invaders raced towards their objective. Instead of destroying resistance, they often bypassed it. This resulted in their logistical support (convoys transporting fuel, food, and ammunition) being ambushed. Russian tanks ground to a halt, now useless, and Russian soldiers began looting food as they faced starvation. Russia’s military was depending on unsecured radio frequencies. Ukrainian intelligence could listen to or jam these communications at will, and civilians began broadcasting taunts directly to Russian soldiers. The invasion date of 22/02/22 appeared to have been chosen because it was a memorable number rather than for a practical reason — Ukraine’s fields had recently turned from ice to mud, restricting vehicles to predictable road routes.

https://thinkmagazine.mt/the-terror-and-incompetence-of-russias-warfare/

Etc, etc.

Enjoy! :cool:

I suspect you are saying this kind of distinction is much trickier in QM? — jgill

Well yes. It’s the difference between tossing a classical coin to discover if it lands head or tails, and knowing that if you toss one of a pair of quantum entangled coins, your fellow experimenter is going to see the opposite of whatever you see, even if he has rocketed to the other side of the universe with his coin.

So both solutions are realised. Both solutions are correlated. Both solutions could just as well have happened the other way around.

It’s tricky.